The Daily Stoic - This Is What Karma Looks Like
Episode Date: February 15, 2022Ryan talks about how your actions impact your well being.Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: http://DailyStoic.com/emailFollow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and FacebookSee Privacy ...Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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Welcome to the Daily Stoke. For each day, we read a short passage designed to help you cultivate
the strength, insight, wisdom necessary for living the good life. Each one of these passages is based on the 2000-year-old philosophy
that has guided some of history's greatest men and women.
For more, you can visit us at dailystowic.com.
This is what karma looks like.
There is a simple proposition at the heart
of classical Christianity.
If you are a good person and do good works on earth,
when you die, you will enter the kingdom of heaven
and know the full bounty of God's unending love.
But if you are a bad person on earth,
and you sin without repenting,
when you die, you'll end up in hell for all eternity.
In many Eastern religions, like Hinduism and Buddhism,
that duality is baked into the singular notion of karma.
Good intentions and good deeds will be repaid in the next life with great kindness.
Bad intent and bad deeds, or sin, will be repaid in the next life with great severity.
The Stoics take a different approach. They don't say that cheating or lying or murdering should
be avoided out of fear of future punishments at the hands of God.
Instead, they make a much more immediate and self-interested case.
Santa Cah especially, who saw Caligula and Nero and other infamous Roman rulers up close,
takes pains to point out that these people are not winning.
Nor are they getting off scot-free for their
crimes. Actually, they are paying for it every single day.
The Stoics would have liked the passage at the conclusion of the novel What Makes Sammy
Run by Bud Schulberg, which renders this verdict on the empty broken life of an immoral
Hollywood studio boss. He writes, I had been waiting for justice suddenly to rise up and smite him in all its vengeance, secretly
hoping to be around when Sammy got what was coming to him.
Only I had expected something conclusive and fatal, and now I realized that what was coming
to him was not a sudden payoff but a process.
A disease he had caught in the epidemic that
swept over his birthplace like a plague, a cancer that was slowly eating him away, the
symptoms developing and intensifying, success, loneliness, fear. Fear of all the bright young
men, the newer fresher Samu Glicks, that would spring up to harass him to threaten him,
and finally overtake him.
The Stoics wouldn't say don't sin where you go to hell.
The Stoics would say don't sin where your life will be hell.
Not your next life, not your after life, but this life right now today.
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